Jitterbug Perfume

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1984

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Preface-Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface Summary

In a series of short prefaces, titled “Today’s Special,” “Seattle,” “New Orleans,” and “Paris,” the author introduces us to several of Jitterbug Perfume’s main characters and themes.

In “Today’s Special,” the narrator introduces the beet as being a “melancholy” vegetable. He quotes a Ukrainian proverb: “A tale that begins with a beet will end with the devil” (2).

In “Seattle,” we are introduced to Priscilla, who the narrator reveals lives modestly in a Seattle studio apartment built during the Great Depression. She returns home from a typically bad day of waitressing, counts her money, recalls a sexual advance from a female coworker named Ricki, and takes a bath. Then, just as she begins a late-night experiment over a chemistry lab installed in her living room, she hears a knock at the door. When she answers it, she finds an unaccompanied beet.

In “New Orleans,” Madame Devalier concocts a perfume with the assistance of V’lu. She works into the wee hours of the morning within her home and shop, Parfumerie Devalier, in the French Quarter. She is known far and wide as the “Queen of Good Smells.” When she turns in to go to bed, she finds a beet mysteriously deposited on her sleeping cot.

In “Paris,” Marcel and Claude LeFever work within the fancy offices of a Parisian skyscraper erected by their family perfume business, which goes back to the 17ths century. Claude is trained in the business of perfume, Marcel in the aesthetics. The two cousins bicker continually over numerous subjects, including the provenance of a red beet delivered to them a week earlier, and about their connection to Parfumerie Devalier.

Part 1 Summary: “The Hair and the Bean”

A thousand years in the past, King Alobar rules over a fictional Eastern European country populated almost exclusively by blonde men and women, some of whom constitute a large harem. Among his greatest treasures is a looking glass, slightly chipped from his wife Frol’s clumsiness, from which he contemplates his brunette whiskers.

Observing himself, he is disturbed to discover a white hair. In Alobar’s country, it is the custom to kill and replace kings when they show the first sign of aging. “Heretofore, the ritual of putting the king to death had seemed to Alobar natural, inevitable, and just” (20), the narrator says, yet Alobar decides he would rather live, and so he plucks the offending hair. He calls his wisest concubine, Wren, and tells her about his predicament. She struggles with the new paradigm—an aging, living king—but decides to keep Alobar’s secret. She warns him against conferring with the court necromancer, Noog: “Wisdom, true knowledge, has been the province of the necromancer alone. You have changed all that, and Noog does not like it” (23). She agrees to check him every day for white hairs, which sprout on a weekly basis.

Nevertheless, Noog becomes suspicious, not least because of Alobar’s newly theatrical vigor in public. He sends a raven to Alobar’s bedroom, which plucks a white hair from Alobar’s head as he makes love to Wren. A date is set for Alobar’s execution, which angers Frol so deeply she shatters the looking glass and is exiled from the kingdom. Meanwhile, Wren swaps out the poisoned egg intended to kill Alobar, replacing it with a concoction of deadly nightshade and seaweed meant to imitate the outward appearance of death. Alobar later wakes in a shallow grave, still alive but no longer a king.

Alobar decides to walk east. Soon he runs into the exiled Frol, and after convincing her that he is not a ghost, they travel together for three days until they reach a Christian settlement called Aelfric, where they decide to settle down. Aelfric practices monogamous marriage and individual burial, two customs Alobar considers refreshingly novel. It also has a priest who reminds the Alobar of Noog, and a shaman who lives on the village outskirts.

After a year of hard work, Alobar and Frol bear a pair of twins. Alobar is invited to join an Aelfric Christmas ceremony. It’s an unusually raucous party for the staid little village. There, he is invited to eat a piece of cake in which he discovers a hard bean, and he is instantly declared “The King of the Bean.” So titled, he is invited to partake in all the carnal extravagances he was formerly afforded as a true king. He is later informed that after 12 days, “The King of the Bean” is ritually executed for his extravagance, putting Alobar back where he started.

He seeks advice from the shaman outside of town, who urges him to run away and find a select group of wise men who know the secrets of immortality. “As far as Egypt is, you must go three times that far,” says the shaman (43). He informs Alobar that the Earth is round, that one day humankind will adhere to a foreign concept called “individualism,” and that Alobar is among the first of this new type of person. Reluctantly, Alobar leaves his wife and children behind.

After weeks of foot travel, Alobar meets the Greek god Pan, who taunts Alobar with displays of divine power. When asked his mission, Alobar declares, “Frankly, I am running away from death” (47). Pan, who no longer commands the worship he once did, declares that he, too, is outrunning death. Together they go to a secluded grotto, where they make love to nymphs, after which Alobar converses with one. She informs Alobar that Pan is associated with female values. “To diminish the worth of women, men had to diminish the worth of the moon,” says the nymph (50). Christianity, she says, is a continuation of this misogyny, and it represents the death of Pan. The next morning, Alobar sets out on his long journey east. The narrator informs us that in later years, alobar will be used as a unit of measurement in the fragrance industry.

The narrator returns us to the present day, in short sections resembling the preface. An eclipse is occurring. In Seattle, Priscilla, via Ricki’s help, secures membership in a group called the Daughters of the Daily Special, whose specific purpose is to support the esoteric projects of women with college degrees who work in the restaurant industry. When asked why she works exclusively in Mexican restaurants, Priscilla says, “I’m searching for the perfect taco” (57). In New Orleans, Madame Devalier is taken aback to learn, from V’lu, that Priscilla is to attend a perfumers’ convention. In Paris, the LeFevers conclude that natural scents might come back into fashion after the current fad for petrochemical scents has run its course. Priscilla, Devalier and the LeFevers are all still receiving unsolicited beets from a mysterious sender.

Preface-Part 1 Analysis

To achieve the effect of magical realism, Tom Robbin’s omniscient third-person narration takes on a life of its own, often providing small asides and pieces of knowledge none of the characters could possibly know, such as the fact that “the beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer” (1), or the completely untrustworthy knowledge that an “alobar” is a unit of measurement defined “as the time it takes Chanel No. 5 to evaporate from the wing tips of a wild duck flying backward” (52). In this way, Robbins points out the unreliable nature of truth, human relations, and even physical reality. In another way, Robbins, by being slightly ridiculous about very serious matters, establishes a total domination over his subject matter. In Jitterbug Perfume, the author alone says what is true and what is false, and he reserves the right to change the rules of reality whenever he feels like it.

The action of the novel takes place both in the present day and roughly a thousand years in the past, when “the Earth was still flat, and people dreamed of falling over edges” (17). The main characters are all very different people, but they share the quality of fierce individualism and a disdain for the mainstream of their respective societies in Paris, Seattle, New Orleans, and Alobar’s ancient, unnamed country in what is now Central Europe. In order to achieve coherence when discussing such disparate people, places and times, Robbins forcefully interjects themes and imagery, using narration that foregrounds itself. Among these, beets predominate. All the modern-day characters receive deliveries of beets, the narrator is preoccupied with the emotional nature of beets, and Alobar’s subjects pride themselves on beet eating, disdaining the weakness of cultures who do not partake of the root vegetable.

The manufacture of perfumes is another strong thread running throughout Jitterbug Perfume. In terms of plot construction, perfume is what ultimately brings all the players in the book together. In these first chapters, however, beets and perfume are the sole constants in otherwise wildly divergent stories.

Finally, sex predominates in Tom Robbins’s work, and Jitterbug Perfume is not an exception. Alobar’s life force and individuality are intimately tied to his sexual drive. His interlude with Pan reinforces this connection. It also attributes Pan’s diminished state to the interruption of the sexual drive presented by Christianity, and the encroaching modern world it represents. “He’s like a sick dove, nowadays, compared to the goat he used to be,” says one of the nymphs about Pan (50). On this subject, Robbins often contradicts himself. According to the shaman, Alobar represents the first real “exceptional, extraordinary, isolated” individual of his kind. At the same time, the shaman frets that Christians, who will go on to define the modern world, “practice separation, not only from the creatures but from other men” (42). So why is one kind of individuality good for Alobar and the other bad? Within context, it seems the only difference between Alobar and Christendom is that Alobar is an “extraordinary” individual compared to the merely ordinary ones who fill church pews. Yet, as noted above, Tom Robbins has granted himself the power to write anything he likes and to change the rules as he sees fit. The book could be better viewed as exertion of his will than a fair engagement with historical ideas.